Lucky Jim

by Kingsley Amis, Keith Gessen (Introduction)

Overview

Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century, Lucky Jim remains as trenchant, withering, and eloquently misanthropic as when it first scandalized readers in 1954. This is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university who knows better than most that “there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.” Amis’s scabrous debut leads the reader through a gallery of emphatically English bores, cranks, frauds, and neurotics, with each of whom Dixon must contend in one way or another in order to hold on to his cushy academic perch and win the girl of his fancy.
 
More than just a merciless satire of cloistered college life and stuffy post-war manners, Lucky Jim is an attack on the forces of boredom, whatever form they may take, and a work of art that at once distills and extends an entire tradition of English comic writing, from Fielding and Dickens through Wodehouse and Waugh. As Christopher Hitchens has written, “if you can picture Bertie or Jeeves being capable of actual malice, and simultaneously imagine Evelyn Waugh forgetting about original sin, you have the combination of innocence and experience that makes this short romp so imperishable.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781590175910
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	10/02/2012
Series:	NYRB Classics Series
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	296
Sales rank:	176,444
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Kingsley Amis (1922–1995) was a popular and prolific British novelist, poet, and critic, widely regarded as one of the greatest satirical writers of the twentieth century. He won an English scholarship to St John’s College, Oxford, where he began a lifelong friendship with fellow student Philip Larkin. Following army service in WWII he completed his degree and joined the faculty at the University College of Swansea in Wales. Lucky Jim, his first novel, appeared in 1954 to great acclaim and won a Somerset Maugham Award; from that point on he would publish roughly a book a year. Amis received the Booker Prize for his novel The Old Devils in 1986 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990.

Keith Gessen is a Russian-born American novelist, translator, activist, and journalist. He co-founded n+1 magazine, based in Brooklyn, in 2004. His debut novel All the Sad Young Literary Men was published in 2008 by The Viking Press, and he has translated from Russian Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl, an oral history of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby with Anna Summers. In 2010 he edited and introduced Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager, and in 2011 became involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement and co-edited the OCCUPY! Gazette. His journalistic writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Atlantic, and New York magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

What People are Saying About This

David Lodge

"A classic comic novel, a seminal campus novel, and a novel which seized and expressed to the mood who came of age in the 1950s. But there is more to it than that...it's university setting functions primarily as the epitome of a stuffy, provincial bourgoise world into which the hero is promoted by education, and against his values and codes he rebels, at first inwardly and at last outwardly."

Anthony Burgess

"Dixon make little dents in these smug fabric of hypocritical, humbugging, classdown British society...Amos cought the mood of post-war restiveness in a book which, does socially significant, wise, and still is extremely funny."

Editorial Reviews

Lucky Jim illustrates a crucial human difference between the little guy and the small man. And Dixon, like his creator, was no clown but a man of feeling after all.” – Christopher Hitchens
 
“Mr. Kingsley Amis is so talented, his observation is so keen, that you cannot fail to be convinced that the young men he so brilliantly describes truly represent the class with which his novel is concerned….They have no manners, and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public bar and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious….They are scum.” – W. Somerset Maugham
 
“’After Evelyn Waugh, what?’ this reviewer asked six years ago….The answer, already, is Kingsley Amis, the author of Lucky Jim….Satirical and sometimes farcical, they are derived from shrewd observation of contemporary British life, and they occasionally imply social morals….Lucky Jim is extremely funny. Everyone was much amused, and since it is also a kind of male Cinderella or Ugly Duckling story, it left its readers goo-humored and glowing.”  —Edmund Wilson, The New Yorker, 1956

“I was recommended [Kinglsey Amis’ Lucky Jim] when I was a teenager trying to figure out how to start reading 'serious' books. Great recommendation, because on the surface it’s nothing of the sort, but it is brilliant.” —Hugh Dancy, T: The New York Times Style Magazine
 
“Remarkable for its relentless skewering of artifice and pretension, Lucky Jim also contains some of the finest comic set pieces in the language.” —Olivia Laing, The Observer

“Remarkably, Lucky Jim is as fresh and surprising today as it was in 1954. It is part of the landscape, and it defines academia in the eyes of much of the world as does no other book, yet if you are coming to it for the first time you will feel, as you glide happily through its pages, that you are traveling in a place where no one else has ever been. If you haven’t yet done so, you must.” —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

From the Publisher

Lucky Jim is as fresh and surprising today as it was in 1954.”

Washington Post

If you can picture Bertie or Jeeves being capable of actual malice and simultaneously imagine Evelyn Waugh forgetting about original sin, you have the combination of innocence and experience that makes this short romp so imperishable.”

New York Times bestselling author Christopher Hitchens

Contains some of the finest comic set pieces in the language.”

The Observer (London)

The celebrated satirical novel LUCKY JIM, published in 1954, is brought to audio with the vocal talents of James Lailey. Brisk and efficient, Lailey lends a crisp delivery to the story of Jim Dixon, a lecturer at a British university, and his various misadventures in academia. Lailey's voice is appealing, but his delivery is often so fast that it’s difficult to appreciate the nuances of Amis's descriptions, much less appreciate the humor in the details. The exposition reveals itself with such speed that Lailey's skills with inflection and tone fail to get their due. The dialogue is readily distinguishable and distinctive, helping to bring the story to life. This is a fine production; it just moves far too quickly. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

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